This is the week Washington pounced on the question of whether or not American “boots on the ground” will be needed in our newest war against the terrifying forces of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq.

It erupted Tuesday when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told a Senate hearing that some future event in Iraq or even Syria may indeed cause him to recommend this combat escalation that his commander-in-chief, President Obama, had only recently said he would not order.

However, all but forgotten in this single-minded focus is another cornerstone of wartime strategy. It’s the one we first deployed aggressively (but not really successfully) in Vietnam a half-century ago— and later used covertly (but apparently successfully) in Afghanistan, although you probably never heard about it. Namely: the need to win “hearts and minds.”

In the war on the Islamic State, the battle for hearts and minds is now a matter of utmost urgency. Because so far it’s the battle the Islamic State is winning— overwhelmingly, in ways that have shocked intelligence experts in the West, including the CIA.

The Islamic State is recruiting new believers and fighters by the thousands— in the Middle East but also the West, especially citizens of Britain and the United States.

Just last January, President Obama had dismissed the al-Qaida-linked militants in Iraq and Syria as just a junior varsity annoyance. (“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama told The New Yorker magazine’s editor David Remnick).

But by spring, the experts were frantically recapitulating. On June 17, The Washington Post reported, “According to academic and intelligence experts, the number of Westerners who have journeyed to the region— and become militarized and radicalized— has surged in the past year from hundreds to as many as 3,000.”

Now the CIA has acknowledged Islamic State strength had soared to perhaps 20,000.

The group has been utilizing recruitment weapons Osama bin Laden never dreamed of as he planned his 9/11 attacks on America’s homeland. It is luring recruits in the West with sophisticated public relations campaigns utilizing top-tech video and Internet arts that look as though they came out of a glitzy Madison Avenue agency. Their targets: young Muslim males who feel disenfranchised and unappreciated in the West.

A new Islamic State video trailer, “Flames of War,” now playing on the Internet looks like a high-class Hollywood flick. It is a bring-it-on dismissal of Obama’s vow to degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State.

A new ultra-slick magazine, “Dabiq,” lures potential jihadists in the West with an Islamic smorgasbord of propaganda: glossy photos of Islamic State troops triumphantly arriving to “liberate” a town; ghastly photos of the beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley.

Once America was the world’s master of overt and covert mind games aimed at shaping geopolitical movements. A little noticed but arguably successful scheme during Ronald Reagan’s presidency was designed to create a militant Islamic revolution to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Here’s how it worked: America’s foreign aid program saturated Afghanistan with school textbooks devised at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies. The texts were designed to mold Islamic boys by glorifying militancy with language celebrating Islamic jihad, photos of war and even by teaching arithmetic by using pictures of soldiers, tanks, guns and landmines as counting tools. Fast-forward: Eventually, the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled it. And, of course, those 1980s boys were fighting-age militants when America invaded after the attacks of 9/11.

Today’s understandable aversion to boots-on-the-ground battles leaves America and the West hoping the Islamic State can be defeated by arming, training and advising so-called moderate rebels in Syria, among the Kurds and in the Iraqi military. Meanwhile, we know they’ll be fighting an Islamic State that is well armed with weapons America gave the Iraqi forces we trained— and which they dropped and ran away when the Islamic State attacked.

The battle for the hearts and minds of military-aged Muslims is a war we must ultimately win. If not, the entire region will ultimately be lost.

For the Islamic State is not really just another band of stateless terrorists. It has declared itself a Caliphate. And it is marketing itself as a unique state — a border-transcending state of mind.

Ultimately, the West may or may not put new boots on the old familiar ground in Iraq and Syria, But this we know:

The battle for Islam’s hearts and minds cannot be won by the West. It can be won only by the world’s influential, sensible but too often silent Islamic leaders. Perhaps they’ve had laryngitis.

Now they must answer Islam’s call — and lead the battle for Islam’s hearts and minds.

Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.